Review: New Carbide Series Case – Corsair SPEC-06

Just recently, Corsair announced the release of a new Cabide series case, and the Carbide SPEC-06 RGB test report is now available. With the curved LED strip in the front, Corsair sets real accents. How the case otherwise performs in our test, you can read here.

Design

The Carbide Series is suitable for every purse. For this there are always interesting and special designs. The new Carbide SPEC-06 has a curved line in the front that is complemented by LED lighting. In the RGB version the colour can be freely adjusted, in the normal version our white housing would also have a white LED in the front. The front itself is made of plastic and can be detached from the case without much effort. The steel frame of the case makes a solid impression. Due to the frame and the glass pane, the case without hardware is a real heavyweight with 7.8 kg and comes with hardware and data carrier already on more than 10 kg.

Behind the front is a magnetic dust filter, which can unfortunately only be removed if the front is also removed. The distances between the frame and the front could be designed in such a way that an optimal airflow prevails without having to pay attention to this dust filter. We find another dust filter on the lid. This, too, is magnetic, as is now offered by every manufacturer. There is another dust filter for the power supply unit, but it is easy to remove.

Three 120mm fans are pre-installed, two in the front and one in the rear. The front has room for another fan of the same size or for two 140 mm fans. Two 120 mm or one 140 mm fans can then be mounted in the lid. There is just as much room for radiators. The radiator can be up to 360 mm in size for the front, up to 240 mm in the lid and 120 mm in the rear. So nothing stands in the way of water cooling.

The I/O panel is mounted directly on the frame, so the front can easily be removed and placed to the side. The panel has two USB 3.0 ports as well as one audio and one microphone port. Typically, the Power and Reset buttons can also be found on the I/O panel.

The RGB lighting controller is located on the back of the housing. So if you want to change the color or the color pattern more often, you always have to reach behind the case. In addition, the controller can “only” display seven colors: white, red, blue, green, orange, yellow and purple. Due to this limited number of colors, for example, the effect “rainbow” is not necessarily beautiful to look at, because it abruptly changes color. There’s not much to choose from either. More choice is available when the “Corsair Commander” is connected, because there is a connection for it. Hardware from other manufacturers cannot be connected due to the proprietary connection.

Scope of Delivery and Workmanship

The scope of delivery is as usual. A box of bags. In the bags there are screws and that not too tight – screws for the mainboard, for data carriers and for the power supply. A warranty card and a short manual in various languages are also available. A hexagon wrench is also included. What the hexagon bolts are for, we ask ourselves. You can change the screws of the glass pane.

The workmanship is through the bank away very good! We save our typical gibberish about the gap dimensions and so on here as an exception. In any case, the quality of the magnetic dust filters in the front and on the cover should be emphasized. The filter on the lid is exactly at the level of the case. Thus there are no protruding edges. Only the I/O panel has a few workmanship flaws.

Inside Structure of the Corsair Carbide SPEC-06

The Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 has a very reasonable size and offers plenty of room for proper cable management. In addition, the interior is very open, everything can be easily reached. Of course, this also applies to the fans. These are mounted in the interior, but the cable is easier to hide. Worthy of praise are the screws on the glass pane, which can be removed by hand, and the rubber-protected cable bushings. The 3.5-inch data carriers can also be mounted without tools.

The Carbide SPEC-06 offers a lot of space for the hardware. With mainboards up to ATX it’s over, but graphics cards can have a length of up to 370 mm, with CPU coolers it’s 170 mm height. Through a hole in the separation from the power supply area, you have the possibility to mount a radiator with a size of 360 mm in the front. According to Corsair, the power supply can be 180 mm long, but due to the limited space up to the hard disk cage, only a modular power supply with this size would make sense, so that the cables are not simply randomly plugged in.

You don’t have to worry about enough expansion slots, with seven you are very well served with the Carbide SPEC-06. If you want to show off your graphics card, you can do the same, because there are two vertical slots so that you can place the graphics card directly behind the glass pane.

The test system contains a Ryzen 7 1700* and a Gigabyte GTX 1060 with 6GB from Aorus*. The ASUS PRIME X370-A motherboard contains 16 GB RAM from Ballistix*.

Conclusion on the Corsair Carbide Series SPEC-06

The Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 offers plenty of space and storage space for the hardware behind the eye-catching LED strip front. You can use up to four SSDs and two HDDs. The controller for the LEDs of the front panel is mounted in a rather unfavourable position, but who always wants to change the lighting colour of the housing? More annoying is rather the sparse choice of colours. If only four colors are offered, the color transition is too abrupt. Unfortunately, the I/O panel has minor flaws. They’re not very conspicuous, it overlooks it. They are definitely worth mentioning.

For about 95 € you get the Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 with adjustable RGB lighting. If the surcharge of 10 € is justified, we simply question it. A good case with a static LED (white or red) can also do a good job. And the Carbide SPEC-06 can definitely do that without a colour-adjustable LED.